The Brief

Genny Richard constantly thinks about her family’s finances.

“The stress level has been immense,” she said. “Because childcare is our largest expense, that's been a big part of the reason.”

Her 5-year-old son is in his third year at a full-time Montessori school in Irvine. It costs her family $2,020 a month — more than their rent. They don’t have family nearby to help with childcare.

“We definitely had to start severely restricting our budget because of that cost,” Richard said. “We hardly eat out … we are part of a community garden, so we grow whatever vegetables we can on our own. … We only have one car.”

They’re also staying put in their two-bedroom apartment, which is offered through UC Irvine, as they expand their family; Richard is due next month. “We’re probably in a smaller apartment than we actually need, especially with a baby on the way,” Richard said.

Still, the bills began to pile up. Expenses like an unexpected trip to urgent care for an ear infection and Richard’s bout of pneumonia forced them to start putting costs onto their credit cards.

“It'd be like, ‘Oh, this thing came up. This medical bill came up. We can't pay that because we have to pay childcare,'” Richard said. “The credit card debt just sort of happened over time.” And they had to deal with high interest rates.

Genny Richard and her husband Fabricio have used credit cards to help pay for expenses because of the cost of their childcare.

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Courtesy Genny Richard

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Richard, who works at a nonprofit, and her husband, a postdoctoral fellow, have accrued tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt over the last several years. They had to pay for their son’s childcare directly from their bank accounts — so they shifted other costs to cards when they could.

Their family is not alone — LAist heard from dozens of Southern California families who have had to go into debt to finance their childcare, or spend down their savings. Childcare can often be one of the largest costs in their monthly budgets, a problem reflected in state and national data:

• In L.A. County, childcare eats up nearly 20% of a median household income, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
• In a 2026 survey by Rocket Mortgage, nearly 60% of respondents said they’ve gone into credit card debt or taken on loans due to child-related expenses. 
• A voter poll conducted this past summer found that 3 in 4 respondents saw the cost of childcare for families with young children as a “crisis” or “major problem.” 

And according to an LAist review of data from the Federal Reserve, the median cost for parents who paid for 20 or more hours of childcare a week went up from $1,100 in 2023 to $1,517 in 2025 — a 38% increase.

How big a problem is childcare debt?

But unlike student loans and other forms of debt, good data on how much consumer debt families have because of childcare isn't available, said Chloe Gibbs, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research who studies the childcare market.

She explained that while student loans are specifically financed, families are “shifting” spending and financing other household costs to pay for childcare and housing.

“We can't really observe that in data because we just see the consumer debt, and we don't know the reason, the impetus behind families perhaps shifting to using credit cards to pay for expenses, so it's an area where we don’t know much,” she said. That affects the ability of researchers and policymakers to know how childcare challenges affect a family’s financial circumstances in both the short and long term, she said, and how they contribute to broader concerns about affordability.

“I think it really is just reflective of the very fragmented landscape around early childhood care and that we just haven't made a concerted public effort in this space at all. So we've kind of left families to navigate and figure out these challenges on their own,” she said. “In the same way, we have just kind of let the data float around in no way that we actually sort of systemically measure and collect.”

What is clear, Gibbs said, is that childcare costs have been rising higher than the rate of inflation, and it’s not surprising families are using credit cards to help with other living expenses. Childcare costs are up 6.6% since January 2025 — and up 31.3% since December 2019, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by the Economic Security Project.

Why are costs rising?

At the same time, childcare providers have been struggling. Childcare providers are among the lowest-paid professionals nationwide. The workforce has also been shrinking, limiting the availability of care, which economists say drives up prices.

A national survey found that early educators are also grappling with the increasing cost of food, insurance and facilities costs in an industry that has already operated on thin margins. As a result, the majority of providers have had to pass along some costs to families by raising tuition, the survey found.

“There's just a fundamental mismatch in this market,” Gibbs said. State and federal childcare subsidies are usually tied to income, Gibbs noted, so families who earn too much to qualify get little help.

“It's insufficient in the current policy landscape because we still see lots of families, well up the income distribution, who face difficulties affording care,” Gibbs said.

What it means to rely on a credit card

Unable to qualify for subsidies, Pamela Arciaga, a mother of a 4-year-old in Glendale, accrued about $20,000 in credit card debt because of her son’s preschool costs. As the sole earner for her household, she couldn’t afford a full-time preschool program, so her son attended three days a week at $1,000 a month. Her parents would help her watch her son on the days he wasn’t in school, driving all the way from Riverside and back.

“What I relied on essentially was just my credit cards to pay for household groceries, sometimes to pay the water bill and power bill, because the preschool that he goes to, it's not as if I could have been on a payment plan, right? It was a monthly invoice that I had to pay so that he can stay in the program,” she said.

Pamela Arciaga and her son Finn. Arciaga has acquired about $20,000 in credit card debt because of childcare costs.

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Courtesy A Golden State for Kids

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Daniel Contreras and his wife were spending about $3,000 a month a young when their children were both in childcare. They didn't use credit cards, but had to forgo savings.

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Courtesy Daniel Contreras

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Arciaga works in early childhood advocacy, and said she also knew the value of preschool education for kindergarten readiness. She saw it as a short-term sacrifice. “It was an investment for me to actually enroll him in preschool,” she said. But the cost is that she’s blown through her emergency savings and is working to pay her debt off now that her son started transitional kindergarten. She pays about $300 a month for after-school care now.

“For emergencies, or anything like that, I still have to rely on the only credit card that I still have [with] a lot of credit on at this point or don't have a balance on,” she said.

She said she wishes that elected officials paid more attention to the issue of childcare costs.

“We have to work to keep the economy going,” Arciaga said. “However, we don't have any support, so it feels like we're paying double on, on top of taxes for not getting a lot of benefits.”

How childcare costs affect families’ futures

For Daniel Contreras and his wife, the cost of childcare has made them reimagine having a large family.

 “The reality sinks in pretty quickly when, you know, child number one comes in, and you're seeing your savings dissipate,” he said.

When Contreras’ children, who are now 7 and 10, were in childcare full-time in Whittier, the family was paying about $3,000 a month. “It was a fourth of our checks, and we had a mortgage still to pay. We had other items, just to keep the lights on.”

They couldn’t afford to save, and scaled back on buying new clothes for their kids. He said they avoided using credit cards to avoid falling into debt. His children are now older and in public school, but he said childcare still eats a large part of their monthly budget. After-school care costs $1,000 a month.

 “So we're still paycheck to paycheck,” Contreras said. “It's like a heavy weight that's being pushed down at this moment.” At times, he’d had to negotiate with his rental's management to avoid a late fee when behind on rent.

He said he recently watched the gubernatorial debate and was disappointed not to hear very much about childcare.

“I don't see anybody really pushing the envelope and supporting the workforce,” he said. “Because the workforce needs help.”

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A pair of Los Angeles County engineers knocked on my door a couple of weeks ago and handed me a booklet about how to prepare for flooding and mudflows. They also told me they offer free, specific engineering advice for individual properties.

I was definitely interested in this — I live in a neighborhood affected by the Eaton Fire, and the house I rent is tucked right against a steep hillside with vegetation that burned.

A few days later, two engineers, as well as the county’s public information officer, showed up at my door.

Eden Ly, a civil engineer with the county, looked up at the mountainside looming above my house.

“This mountainside is very steep, and that's the scary part,” Ly said.

The more recent the burn scar, the steeper the hillside and the closer your house is to it, the bigger the danger. The good thing, Ly said, is that much of the vegetation looked pretty recovered from the fire, so the roots should hold onto the dirt. And the property has a retaining wall that Ly said looks solid.

L.A. County civil engineer Eden Ly, right, assesses a retaining wall behind the house of reporter Erin Stone in a neighborhood affected by a recent wildfire.

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Kerjon Lee

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L.A. County Department of Public Works

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Before coming to do a scheduled assessment of a resident’s property, Ly said he and his team analyze all kinds of data to understand how water — and thus mud and debris — may flow there.

“This will include a lot of geospatial information, a lot of mapping, such as topography,” Ly said. It also includes, Ly said, historical rain gauge data to understand how intense rain tends to be in different areas, soil types and more.

So far this season, Ly and his team have knocked on the doors of over 700 homes — 233 homeowners have received walk-through assessments of their properties, said Kerjon Lee, a spokesperson for the county’s Public Works Department.

“A lot of this data isn't public,” Ly said. "And even if it was public, how is the average Joe going to be able to understand what's going on? So our job is to try to bridge that gap.”

By Ly’s analysis, the terrain above my place is gravelly and muddy, not big boulders that can tear through a house. So if the hill does slide, we should be spared something like the deadly mudslides Montecito experienced in 2018, after the Thomas Fire.

“It's more of that kind of mud flow, that mud river that is more the concern in this case,” Ly said.

He suggests various areas to strategically place plywood planks and sandbags. I’m a renter, so there’s not much else I can do.

What if I have to leave?

Then Ly pointed to a weak spot that could lead to mud flowing where we park our cars.

“Heavy storm; we will probably recommend you try not to be there,” he said.

In a strong storm like that, I expect my neighborhood will get evacuation warnings — at least.

This winter, warnings or even orders to leave could become common.

Half an inch of rainfall in less than an hour — or more than 3 to 4 inches in a day — can trigger debris flows after a recent wildfire.

But that’s just a rule of thumb. As bare dirt becomes more saturated with back-to-back storms, less intense rainfall can be a trigger. So in addition to the engineering assessment and prep work, paying attention to forecasts and knowing how water flows where you live is key.

“Our best advice is that you try to deflect and guide everything,” Ly said. But “it's Mother Nature; you can't stop it.”

Talk to neighbors

Overall, Ly tells me the swales my landlord built behind the house, and those my neighbors built, look like they’ll direct water and mud to the street, which is generally the goal.

And that’s another piece of advice he gives — talk to my longtime neighbors, who have been through a storm or a few.

Ly tells me his team will email a more detailed report once they dig into a little more data. That’s part of the free service for higher-risk homes.

In addition to the plans I’ve got for our pets, important medications, possessions and other things I'll need if we have to evacuate, the county's assessment left me with valuable advice — and a little less anxiety too.

The Los Angeles Police Department has become a major issue in the race for L.A. mayor, with the fate of Chief Jim McDonnell at the center of the debate between the candidates.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is challenging incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, has called for the chief’s removal, saying his department was too cooperative with federal immigration agents during last year’s protests over raids.

“I believe he’s lost the trust of Angelenos, especially in light of the ICE raids,” Raman said at a debate earlier this month.

Bass has backed McDonnell, whom she appointed in 2024, saying removing a chief so close to the 2028 Olympics would send the department into "disarray." She also points out crime is down across the city, mirroring crime trends nationwide.

"I don’t think you have any idea what it takes to remove a police chief," Bass said to Raman during the debate.

So what does it take to remove a police chief?

Here’s a closer look at L.A.’s famously contentious history with police leadership in the past and how that has resurfaced in the lead up to the current election.

Mayoral power to remove a chief

The police chief is among the most visible and powerful figures in city government, overseeing 8,500 officers and a budget of more than $3.5 million dollars — a figure that amounts to more than half the city’s general fund.

Technically, a mayor can’t unilaterally oust a police chief. Only the Police Commission can do that. But the mayor appoints the five-member panel and therefore has a great deal of influence on that decision.

Mayors can always appoint commissioners who bend to their will.

An ousted chief may appeal to the City Council, but would need the support of two-thirds of its members to be reinstated.

Raphe Sonenshein, executive director of the Haynes Foundation — a group dedicated to effective governance in L.A., said it used to be nearly impossible to remove a police chief in the city of Los Angeles.

L.A.’s police chief once enjoyed civil service protection, a strong shield against termination, and was practically the most powerful political figure in the city, Sonenshein said. Removal “was almost a forbidden topic.”

“The police chief stayed as long as the police chief wanted to stay,” Sonenshein said.

Several major events in the 1990s changed that, including the 1991 beating of Rodney King, which followed years of complaints by Black and Latino residents of police abuse.

After the King beating, then-Mayor Tom Bradley called for then-Police Chief Daryl Gates to step down, but Gates refused to do so. Four police officers seen in video of the King beating were charged with felony assault and other charges, but were later acquitted on nearly all counts.

In the wake of verdict and the riots that followed, voters approved Proposition F, stripping police chiefs of civil service protection and creating a five-year term limit, subject to one five-year extension.

The 1992 riots prompted liberal L.A. to elect a conservative millionaire businessman Richard Riordan as mayor the following year.

Daryl Gates controversy

Earlier this month, Raman praised Gates for his policy of prohibiting officers from asking people about their immigration status. She called it the “gold standard” on police not cooperating with federal immigration agents

Bass said the comment showed Raman was out of touch with the history of L.A. and the role of Gates, a polarizing figure whose department often brutalized Black and brown communities.

Raman has since apologized. “I apologize for talking about an issue that I know causes real pain to Angelenos,” said Raman on the Yesi Ortiz podcast. She also apologized on CNN.

McDonnell, has defended his officers’ response to ICE protests, saying demonstrators threw rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails at them, necessitating the use of tear gas. He has called his officers’ actions “heroic.”

Robb Korinke, who runs the political consultancy group Grassrootslab, said opposing McDonnell fits in with an "anti-establishment"-bent in this election.

“I don't think anyone is safe, whether you're an incumbent, elected or figurehead of a major city department,” he said.

On Monday, as the mayoral debate heated up, billionaire developer Rick Caruso said that he’s voting for Bass for mayor. Caruso, who lost to Bass four years ago by 10 percentage points, said he believed Bass had learned from her mistakes and that she had grown into the job.

Caruso also said he had "serious concerns" about Raman, particularly her desire to remove McDonnell. 

Caruso said this is no time to turn the LAPD "into a laboratory for risking experimentation" by the Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed Raman.

Politics of policing have changed

Proposition F changed police politics in Los Angeles. But there were other factors as well, including a change in the election schedule.

L.A.’s switch from holding elections during off-years to during presidential and midterm years dramatically increased the number of voters who participated in city elections.

The electorate is much bigger, younger and more liberal, Korinke said.

“Until a few years ago, the city of Los Angeles held elections in odd years, meaning there was extremely low voter turnout, sometimes as low as in the high teens,” he said, adding that races were decided by more suburban parts of the city with mostly white voters.

“The politics of policing specifically have changed a lot from an environment that was very favorable to policing historically,” Korinke said.

He also explained that progressive voters have taken a greater interest in local issues in recent years, and police reform has become a big focus.

"The voting populace is a little just a little bit more skeptical of the expense that goes along with policing,” he said.

It's one reason police union spending on political races has become less potent in recent years.

Together with the firefighters union, the police union spent more than $1 million in an effort to defeat Raman’s reelection bid to the City Council two years ago. Raman narrowly won the race.

This year, the union is spending nearly $2.8 million to defeat Raman and elect Bass as mayor.

Bass approved big pay raises for officers in 2023. Raman voted against them, saying the money should be spent in other areas like parks and streetlight repair.

Braddock Sandoval perused tables with wigs, a Darth Vader mask, a black tutu and other items and garments on an unusually sizzling day in Los Angeles. He found a Hawaiian flower necklace and a shark costume and tried them on.

The chemistry professor at Occidental College heard about a campus swap where he could pick out a free Halloween costume with the goal of keeping it from being thrown away. Curious and in need of one, he swung by to see what he could find.

“I think there’s too much cheap plastic waste in this world. So the idea that people are recycling costumes is fantastic, both for budgets, like me, but also just for the planet,” Sandoval said with a laugh. He planned to attend a Halloween dance party dressed as a great white shark eating a tourist — a costume inspired by the freebies he found at the swap.

Every Halloween, costumes get their big moment. But every year, millions end up in a landfill after a single use, and many are made from synthetic plastics that don’t easily break down, contributing to environmental pollution. In Southern California and across the country, Halloween costume swaps and thrift stores are keeping costumes from going to waste. People can donate clean costumes and pick a new one, reducing waste and the resources and emissions required to make new ones.

This year, the National Retail Federation estimates Americans will spend some $4.4 billion on Halloween costumes. In 2018 alone, they discarded about 11.3 million tons (10.25 million metric tons) of textiles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. When shopping sustainably, experts say, keep three principles in mind: Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Shelie Miller, a University of Michigan professor who studies the environmental impacts of products, said Halloween costumes, like fast fashion, are often made cheaply from plastic materials. They tend to fall apart, she said, and are “not really intended to stick around for a very long time.”

And there are other environmental impacts.

Clothing accounts for 4% to 10% of global carbon emissions, she said, while textile dyeing contributes about 20% of wastewater emissions from industrial sources worldwide.

Synthetic fibers used in clothing, including many costumes, can shed microplastics during washing and end up in water sources, she said. Microplastics have been found in the ocean, air, food and water, as well as a range of human tissues. Growing evidence suggests they can pose risks to human health. Many of these materials are made from oil, which emits pollutants when burned, driving climate change and fueling extreme weather.

“The process of making these, the Halloween costumes, it’s incredible,” said Zack Bowersox, a senior lecturer in political science at Washington University in St. Louis who teaches a class on fast fashion and the environment.

Rather than being stitched together, costumes are often heat bonded, with the plastic melted at the edges to join pieces. “After the season, they’re not meant to even be thrifted or returned, they’re just meant to be thrown away. And that’s where most of them end up, it’s in the landfill. Something like 80% of those suits end up in the landfill,” Bowersox said.

Miller said there are many ways to enjoy Halloween without buying a one-off costume.

“Whenever we buy anything, we’re not just buying the one thing, we’re buying all of the environmental impacts of everything that went into making that product,” Miller said. “So whenever we’re using any sort of single-use product, whether we’re talking about single-use plastic or single-use costumes, we really have to be thinking about is this really how we want to spend our time, money, resources, and is there a better way?”

Braddock Sandoval, a chemistry professor at Occidental College, poses for photos with a costume he picked out during a Halloween costume swap on the campus in Los Angeles, Friday, Oct. 16, 2026

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Jae C. Hong

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Associated Press

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How one fashion lover launched a Halloween costume swap

Sustainable fashion advocate Lexy Silverstein founded the Ultimate Halloween Swap last year after realizing how much money and material went into a costume that might be worn only a few hours before being dumped.

As an avid Halloween fan who loves donning costumes, she was forced to reflect on her own consumption and waste.

“That’s a lot of costumes that I’m buying and wearing once and getting rid of,” she told herself. And she began thinking of other seasons that encourage people to buy new things, like back-to-school time.

Last year, the swap collected hundreds of costume donations, including 10 boxes from the LA Clippers basketball team. It was such a success that she decided to do it again and has since expanded across Southern California, including at Occidental College where Sandoval found his shark suit.

Now, Silverstein is hoping to organize swaps for back-to-school, prom season, winter coats and other high-consumption, single-use times of year.

Washington University in St. Louis has its own version going. Its thrift store is stocked with clothes and items collected during student move-outs when many items get left behind, including Halloween costumes and accessories. For the second year, it organized an on-campus pop-up where the campus community could buy used Halloween costumes for a low price.

Cassie Hage, the university’s assistant director at the Office of Sustainability, said this year’s selections included Austin Powers and kiwi outfits, a demon from the hit TV show “Stranger Things” and matching platypus onesies that delighted a group of friends who stumbled upon them.

“They were kind of dancing around” in them, she said. “That was just a really fun moment to watch.”

How to reduce, reuse, recycle

Thrifting, attending clothing swaps and raiding friends’ and family members’ closets are all ways to avoid buying new costumes. You can assemble a Halloween costume from clothes and accessories you or a friend already own, or modify existing pieces to create a new look.

Silverstein also suggests renting costumes by looking through websites like Facebook Marketplace, Depop and Poshmark.

If you have to buy something, Bowersox suggests buying costumes or accessories made of plant-based materials such as cotton or linen. Licensed products can cost more, he said, but can offer greater transparency over how and where they’re made.

Alison Linder, assistant sustainability coordinator at Occidental College, which has a thrift store of its own with Halloween costumes in stock, encouraged people to organize their own swaps with neighbors, friends or school classmates.

“It’s just as easy as asking your friends for a loan and offering to share what you have,” she said. “And just by doing that simple thing, you save money and you’re helping the environment.”

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

In the increasingly bitter legal standoff between President Donald Trump and media outlets whose reporting he dislikes, a new and crucial third party has emerged: citizens who watch and read the news and need it to do their jobs.

A lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of six such citizens — essentially representing the wider public audience — argues that it’s not only the rights of news organizations that are violated when Trump bans them from White House premises. Even more fundamentally, the lawsuit argues, such bans violate the public’s right to independent reporting about its president and government.

“The ultimate injury here … is to the democratic public,” says the suit, filed in federal district court in New York against Trump and three key aides, including the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

“The First Amendment protects the public’s right to know what its government is doing,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, along with the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.

“The White House cannot decide what information Americans receive by punishing critical reporting,” Fallow said in a statement. “When the White House expels reporters because of their coverage and threatens others with expulsion, it isn’t just the press that suffers — the public loses access to independent reporting and gets something closer to government propaganda.”

The Trump administration, asked for comment on the lawsuit, responded in a statement that it attributed to an unidentified White House official: “No person may demand access to the Oval Office.” It said media that peddle “misinformation and defamation are completely capable of reporting their manufactured stories from directly outside.”

The plaintiffs all rely on White House news for their work

The six plaintiffs are all people who say they rely on independent and diverse White House reporting for their teaching, journalism or advocacy. They include a noted human rights advocate, a political journalist, a Yale history professor, a high school civics teacher, a legal journalist, and a student journalist at the University of Pennsylvania.

The complaint filed Monday recounts how various news organizations that have been targeted by Trump are already battling the administration in the courts. These cases include the current lawsuit by CNN, MS NOW and Politico, whose journalists were banished from the White House in September.

A federal judge recently extended an order preventing the White House from enforcing the ban while the case makes its way through the legal system. Still affected, though, is CNN’s pool coverage of Trump. The White House has been denying the network its usual slots in the video pool covering the president’s activities and travel, and CNN has threatened further action.

Also continuing is the legal case involving The Associated Press, whose reporters were barred last year from the Oval Office, Air Force One and some events in retaliation for the outlet’s decision not to follow Trump’s lead in changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, which lies partially in Mexican and other waters, to the Gulf of America.

The New York Times is also involved in litigation, over a Pentagon policy requiring escorts for journalists on its grounds. And ABC is fighting back against the Trump administration in a dispute over renewal of its broadcast licenses.

This lawsuit seeks more wide-ranging relief

The new lawsuit filed Monday, though, is different from previous legal action against the president — first, in that the plaintiffs are ordinary citizens, shifting the focus from news gatherers to news consumers, and thus implying a much larger pool of stakeholders. In addition, it seeks more wide-ranging relief.

The suit, which names Trump as defendant along with Wiles, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, and Secret Service Director Sean M. Curran, calls not merely for reinstatement of access that has already been impacted, but for a broad injunction that would protect from retaliation every news outlet that covers the White House —- now, and in the future.

“Defendants’ policy of restricting the access of disfavored news organizations deprives the public of the reporting of those organizations,” the complaint says. It also “inevitably deprives them of the independent reporting of other news organizations as well, since every journalist who reports from the White House must now account for the possibility that a critical or ill-advised word about the president may result in their access being summarily restricted or revoked.”

“Plaintiffs ... seek a declaration that the policy is unconstitutional because it imposes restrictions on a limited public forum that are viewpoint-based and unreasonable,” the complaint adds. “They also seek an injunction barring defendants from enforcing the policy.”

Plaintiffs include a human rights advocate, a teacher and a student journalist

The plaintiffs are:

—Kenneth Roth, former longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch and a lecturer at Yale’s law school and school of global affairs. Roth “relies on newsgathering and reporting from members of the White House press corps to inform his public writing and commentary,” the suit says.

—Daniel Froomkin, media and political journalist and editor of Press Watch, a nonprofit that encourages political journalists to “fulfill their essential mission of creating an informed electorate and holding the powerful accountable.”

—Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and professor at Yale University who “relies on newsgathering and reporting from the White House press corps to inform her scholarship, public writing and commentary.”

—Peter Schmidt-Nowara, a social studies teacher at a New York City high school, who teaches civics courses and considers White House reporting “essential to his work as an educator.”

—Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, whose publication is “especially reliant on the White House press corps to provide accurate and timely coverage of the president.”

—Ethan Young, a student at the University of Pennsylvania and editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian, who, as a student journalist, “relies on a diverse, independent and trustworthy cohort of White House reporters to serve as his proxy.”

Schmidt-Nowara, who teaches at Brooklyn Technical High School, is quoted in the lawsuit as saying: “As a social studies teacher, I want my students to have access to accurate, independent reporting about their government.” He adds he is “gravely concerned that the Trump administration’s restrictions on White House reporters are cutting off access to crucial information.

“I joined this lawsuit because my students deserve to know what’s happening in their government and to hear from a free and independent press,” he says.

Young, the student journalist, contends that since he can’t personally access White House press spaces, he relies on “a diverse, independent and trustworthy cohort” of White House reporters to serve as his proxy.

The effect of federal policy changes has been “acutely felt on college campuses, Penn’s included,” Young is quoted as saying. “As a student journalist, I rely on reporting from the White House press corps to understand the decisions made in Washington, their consequences, and how they impact my college community. A vibrant free press allows me to do just that.”